February 1st, 2010

~Monday~The university was on a noontime opening delay today, but our manager sent an e-mail last night saying it was fine to work from home, of which I took advantage.

I left my house at about 1:30 just to give myself plenty of time to arrive at Tompkins Hall for my 3:00 presentation to Cat Warren's Editorial and Opinion Writing Class. I always want to write that as "opinion-writing," and I'm not so sure it shouldn't be that. But I digress...

In spite of an e-mail that many of the Wolfline buses were heavily delayed due to the snow reeking havoc on the roads, the #9 Greek Village bus arrived just as I was arriving at the stop. Every time someone takes a seat two from me, whose girth also hangs over the chair a little, I watch for very skinny people coming on the bus and when I see one think, "You could sit here between us."

I heard a story or news blurb about it on NPR, and they quoted one of the guys from The South Butt product line, who said with regards to the likelihood that people might buy The South Butt when they thought they were getting The North Face, something to the effect of, "I don't think there's any consumer in America who is going to think they're getting a face when they're buying a butt." Classic.

Arriving a little over an hour early for class in Tompkins, I made a pit stop in the men's room where I found all three urinals participating in the "If it's yellow let it mellow; if it's brown flush it down" movement—or lack of movement as it were.

From about 2:00-2:45, I sat in the English department's computer lab, since it was right next door to the class in which we were going to meet, and I worked from there. At about quarter 'til 3:00, I moved out to the bench in the hall across the room, where some students began to gather, and I assumed they were students in the class I was about to speak in.

A couple of them sitting close to me started talking about the class, about a guest speaker they'd had last week, and one said something to the effect of, "Yeah, we're having another one today. They're usually okay, but some of them do go on and on and on." And then they alluded to the gist of what last week's speaker talked about, and one of them started, "Yeah. This guy's supposed to talk about..." and I interrupted saying, "Don't be talking about me now."

They looked over in surprise, and then one of them said, "How embarrassing." I just laughed, thinking what would have been embarrassing would have been if I'd've let them go on and on and on. Touché.

One of the guys quickly broke the awkwardness—and I appreciated his sense of humor. Another person coming to class walked up to him and said, "How's it going?" and he retorted, "We're having an exciting guest speaker today." To which I replied, "Good answer! Good answer!" à la Family Feud. We all laughed. Too funny.

I think my presentation went well enough; at least I wasn't nervous. The professor interrupted a couple of times to tie a particular point I was making in to something germane to their class, which I liked. I found one or two "friendly faces" in the crowd—one girl in particular who often smiled whenever we made eye contact while I was saying something that was supposed to be amusing, and I only really noticed one person "drifting" at one point in my presentation.

Anyhow, I appreciated the opportunity to reflect on my thoughts about best practices in blogging. One of the things that I learned about Livejournal (after using it for over 8 years now) is that you can set the "mature audience" flag per posting. I always thought it was for the entire blog or not at all, so that was good to learn. And that reminded me of all the things I learned about my microwave, which I'd had for several years, when I used it as the product for usability test during my Master's degree class on usability. But I digitally digress yet again...

And, finally, it was good to meet Dr. Cat Warren. I'm quite sure we never met the entire four years I was in grad school (2004-2007), but I of course heard her name a lot and saw pictures and bios of her in the English department's faculty pages on the web over the years.

While waiting for the bus at the bell tower, this guy walked up to the stop just a-shaking his head back and forth and immediately unloaded on me. "Man, class was canceled. I got all the way here, and class was canceled. I was on my couch debating, 'I'm gonna skip. Nah, I should go. It'll look good if I show up in this weather.' Then I'm going in the building and I see someone coming out who was in my clas. 'Don't tell me.' I hadn't even gotten to the room yet."

Bell tower: BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG. Me: Look at the time!

My own class from 6:00-7:15 was canceled tonight due to the university inclement weather policy, so I took advantage of that and headed over to the gym a little earlier than I might have.

It's the first Monday night of the month, and you know what that means at Planet Fitness—free pizza night. The boxes were stacked on the table and it smelled heavenly as I passed by.

A young girl with short shorts was bent over the counter trying to explain why serving pizza in a gym wasn't a good idea. I'm sure if I were straight, I'd've been more interested in the posture of her ass than the posturing of her case. What she didn't seem to get was that these people are "dumb as a fox." Evidently she had not yet made the connection between pizza-eating customers and repeat business. Bless her butt heart.

Oh! That comment reminds me of something I said yesterday in class—that one of my goals is to write without judgment in my blog entries. I'm striking that from my official list of "communicative purposes." I may try on some level, but I'm not at all successful at it. I am an ESFJ after all.

Let's see. Where was I? Oh yeah, at the gym. Today I did my lower body routine, which started off with a real strain on my muscles on the leg extension machine. I usually start on the leg press machine, but they were both taken, one by a guy who was breaking two rules—well one broken rule and one gym etiquette breach. He was talking on the phone, which you're not allowed to do in my gym, and he was sitting on a machine while he was doing it. Idiot! (Me? Judge?)

After my lower body routine, I started on my 300 (15 sets of 20 reps) ab crunches, and when I raised my torso up on the first rep of set 15, I thought, "OMG, I'm going to puke." A bout of nausea seized me, and I thought, "Oh, just do another one and it'll go away." NOT. I quickly got up and headed to the locker room.

Although it passed without incident, as is my answer to nausea, I ate. And oh look... free pizza. Well, it was about 8:00 at night, and I still had over 700 calories yet to eat. I counted that slice as 300 of them.